Danger scale

I've been reading Steven Pinker's bestseller about language, published back in 1994, entitled The Language Instinct. It is indeed an excellent and refreshing book, which insists upon the fact that humans are not really taught to communicate by language, even though many parents surely imagine that their children would never have learned to speak were it not for the teaching efforts of their parents... who've often made a huge effort to become experts in "baby talk", believing naively that this was the only way of being understood by their toddlers. No, as Pinker's title suggests, the basic capacity to use language is a human instinct shared by every individual. The proof that our linguistic ability is instinctive is the fact that we say many things that have probably never been said before. So, how could we have been taught to make such statements?

Anecdote. Many years ago, I encountered briefly an exceptional woman: the English philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, a world authority on the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889-1951], whose mysterious and celebrated Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus had fascinated me when I was a student back in Sydney. Anscombe, closely linked to friends in Brittany who shared her Catholic faith, told us a weird story about one of her sons who had never uttered a single sound up until the age of four. One day, unexpectedly, he proclaimed loudly in perfect English: "Mother, you must punish my brother, for he just tried to lock me up in a wardrobe." Stupefaction! From then on, he spoke normally, as if some kind of a mental dam had been unclogged. This trivial anecdote would have probably never impressed me so much were it not for the associations between Anscombe and Wittgenstein.

Recently, I was fascinated by a TV documentary concerning the amazing story of the Israeli crooner Moshe Brand, who was a French celebrity under the name of Mike Brant, up until he jumped to his death from the balcony of a building in Paris. He too, as a child in Israel, never pronounced a single word. Then, at the age of four, he suddenly started to speak in Hebrew, revealing an exceptionally powerful and beautiful vocal tone that would contribute later to his international success as a singer.

Getting back to Pinker's book, I'm amused by his debunking of the silly myth about Eskimos having a huge variety of words for snow. The truth of the matter is that Eskimos probably use fewer words than a run-of-the-mill Alpine skier to talk about various kinds of snow.

When I arrived in France, I was intrigued by cases of a single English word being replaced by two or more French terms. For example, whenever an English-speaking person talks about finding bones [in French: os] in his fish dish, French observers are greatly amused. They imagine, say, a humble trout with a huge thigh bone. The correct French word for the bony things you find in a fish skeleton is arête.

Another stumbling block was the word scale. In a measurement context—for example, in maps—the French equivalent is échelle, which is also the word for ladder. But in music, when referring, say, to the scale of C major, a quite different word appears in French: gamme. Apparently, this new word has something to do with the Greek letter gamma. So, back at the time I was taking guitar lessons in Brussels, not only did I have to replace C, D, E by do, ré, mi, etc, but I had to force myself to refrain from speaking, say, of the échelle de do majeur.

The subject I wanted to evoke today (after taking quite some time to get around to it) is danger scales for potentially catastrophic events. To start the fireball rolling, let's say that everybody has heard of the famous Richter scale for earthquakes. As strange as it might appear, this logarithmic scale has no upper limit. Consequently, we could never refer to an earthquake of "the greatest possible magnitude", because there would be always be room at the top of the scale for an even more disastrous earthquake. That's nice scientific rigor, but I wouldn't feel like buying a used car from an earthquake scientist who told me that the vehicle required no more than a couple of minor repairs.

I wonder how many people are aware of a similar scale for accidents in the domain of peaceful nuclear energy, known as the INES. Now Ines, pronounced een-ess, happens to be an elegant French female Christian name of Greek etymology, meaning "pure and virginal", which I've encountered once or twice. But the INES that concerns me today is an acronym for the International Nuclear Event Scale, whose eight degrees extend upwards from zero to seven, from green to red.

As I pointed out in my articles of 17 June 2007 entitled Nice TV spot [display] and 27 December 2007 entitled Nuclear energy [display], France is covered with a relatively dense system of nuclear reactors run by a state-owned corporation named Areva, whose president is Anne Lauvergeon. Well, over the last fortnight, several minor accidents have occurred. The first was at the Tricastan site on the Rhône.

Many years ago, Christine and I spent some time there, when it was still thought of as the Pierrelatte center for refining the stuff with which you make atomic bombs. I was participating as a computing instructor in a job skills recycling program aimed at transforming nuclear energy technicians into computerists. I remember, above all, that we were housed in a VIP lodge in the woods, and that the notorious Mistral wind, blowing through the Rhône Valley, drove me mad during my entire stay at Pierrelatte. Indeed, these days, whenever my friends Natacha and Alain extoll the splendors of Provence, I still think to myself: Provence, yes... but Mistral, no!

Over the last fortnight, there have been no less than four accidents in nuclear installations operated by the French electricity authority, EDF. One occurred in the nearby city of Romans, and another in my home département, Isère. We're informed that they were all trivial events on the INES scale... which is nice to know. The latest accident, resulting in the irradiation of a hundred Tricastin employees, was of level zero on the INES scale. A French journalist, not accustomed to the habit (derived from computing) of starting to count with zero, asked rhetorically whether the nuclear authorities might end up trying to convince us that we're faced with negative dangers from their reactors!

There is, in fact, a competent French government agency, called ASN [Nuclear Safety Authority], in charge of safety and security in the nuclear energy domain. [Click their logo to access English-language documentation.]

Funnily enough, we're faced with a similar situation to the doping affairs in cycling, as sketched in my article of 18 July 2008 entitled Half empty or half full? [display]. If we seem to be hit suddenly by an avalanche of nuclear incidents, this doesn't necessarily mean that the whole engineering infrastructure is deteriorating. On the contrary, these danger alerts stem no doubt from the fact the security and detection processes are becoming more and more refined and intense. So, let's be optimistic.

Cadel, a flat-out manager

Arithmetically, if all goes well, Cadel Evans should win this year's Tour de France, envisaged beforehand by former champion Laurent Fignon as a transitional event (a dull vintage, one might say) because, for the moment, there are no outstanding champions.

I hope he does, and I think he will. We'll see, next Saturday, in the all-important time trial. French cycling journalists drew attention, this afternoon, to the expert way in which Cadel Evans, with little or no assistance from Silent Lotto team members, is using all his resources to manage his status in the Tour.

Meanwhile, I'm dismayed to have to point out that, within the media context of this spectacular sport, characterized by athletic beauty and daring showmanship, Cadel is no doubt the least aesthetic and exciting cyclist we've seen for a long time. On a bike, he's frankly ugly: sprawled out with his head down, in the fat flat toad style of the Irish champion Sean Kelly. His bike wobbles all over the road, like a mad woman's shit [as my refined mates used to say back in South Grafton, when I was an adolescent cyclist]. These factors might explain why race commentators imagine constantly that Cadel is worn out, at breaking point... even when there's nothing wrong with him whatsoever. He's simply and sadly a rider who never exudes an impression of dominating power. And this view of Cadel is amplified by the fact that he never actually launches an attack against anybody. He's a defender, a defense manager, not a warrior.

Today, we're tempted to contrast Cadel with the impressive Andy Schleck from Luxembourg, who rides with his head held high, watching all around him, darting behind anyone who moves, sniffing the air and dashing into combats like a mad young dog: a metaphor suggested yesterday by his brother Frank, champion of Luxembourg, who took the yellow jersey away from Cadel a few days ago.

The French cycling world often uses a curious word, panache, which designates literally a vain show of feathers, like those of a male peacock. A down-to-earth explanation of the sense of this word would involve talking about a cyclist's being seen in an attractive light on TV, as a star, and earning the reputation of a kind of Zorro on wheels. Cadel Evans, alas, doesn't radiate panache. In his present role as a flat-out manager of Tour de France events, he oozes nothing more than dull managerial weariness. But it's not this kind of weakness that will prevent him from wearing the yellow jersey, as I hope, on the Champs Elysées next Sunday.

Santa Claus is not necessarily trash

A popular cult film in France, Le Père Noël est une ordure [Father Christmas is a scoundrel ], produced in 1982, starred Gérard Jugnot as a sleazy commercial Santa Claus.

Dressed as Father Christmas, Félix was earning his living on Paris sidewalks by carrying a billboard and distributing leaflets for a local strip joint. After a minor shoplifting incident and a scuffle with department store personnel, Félix lost his white beard and had to run for his life. The rest of the film is a symphony of delightfully sick humor, enhanced by splendid acting, with exotic dialogues that countless French aficionados of my generation know off by heart.

The world has just learned with amazement of another evil Santa Claus, Radovan Karadzic, who has spent the last decade or so running for his life.

A few days ago, in a totally different domain, my friend Corina informed me of the existence of an extraordinary Italian monk, Friar Cesare Bonizzi, known as Fratello Metallo (Metal Brother).

In the unlikely event that this white-bearded Capuchin could no longer count upon records and rock concerts to earn precious dimes for his monastery in Milan, he would surely be able to do Santa Claus stints.



After hearing the above stuff, I'm prepared to vouch for the fact that Fratello Metallo is not a disguised scoundrel fleeing from justice.

BREAKING NEWS

Today, it's surrealistic to discover Karadzic's website [display], including "10 favorite ancient Chinese proverbs as selected personally by Dr Dabic". I hope the authorities have the good sense to preserve this legacy site, which is a tiny fragment of the long history of evil and terror in the Balkans. It's almost like finding a nice little unpublished postscript to Mein Kampf.

Satire

The New Yorker cover with an image of Barack Obama and his wife, presented by artist Barry Blitt as terrorists, created an uproar.

It was intended, in good faith, as satire. The definition of this term starts as follows in my online Macintosh dictionary:

the use of humor, irony, exaggeration or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics...

For me, there's a slight but significant hitch in this case of alleged satire. The artist has indeed used exaggeration to depict the Obama couple as imagined by their enemies, but the resulting concoction is simply not funny. There is no hint of humor or irony in this caricature, which does nothing to ridicule Obama's mindless opponents. For me, this cover drawing is far too literal to merit the title of satire.

Let's move back in time to the Nazi epoch. Many Germans looked upon Jews with delusions of a similar craziness to those concerning Obama today. The typical Jew was stigmatized as ugly, evil and cruel, caring only for wealth, and capable of taking control of weak nations (like France) that had allowed themselves to become the victims of Bolshevism. A well-meaning but unimaginably naive magazine might have thought it funny to put the following image on their cover, as an intended satire of Nazi nonsense:

Alas, far from being a humorous satire intended to ridicule Nazis, this poster was a nasty specimen of hate propaganda, designed to promote a notorious film, Der ewige Jude [the eternal Jew], supervised by Joseph Goebbels and directed by Fritz Hippler. So, you might say that there's a fine line separating satire from offensive shit. The distinction resides in the talents and desires of the individuals who are manipulating, for good or for evil, such powerful messages.

I've often felt that Americans don't always reveal a firm and subtle mastery of political humor and satire. They tend to remain too close to the literal surface, without an aptitude for handling what the French refer to as the second degree of irony, which occurs at rare moments when a skilled humorist succeeds in making fun of fun itself.

In the neighboring domain of stage comedians of the one-man-show kind, I've often been intrigued by comparisons between celebrities from Australia, Britain, America and France. It's a vast and fascinating subject, which cannot of course be handled summarily, here in my blog. In fact, it would be an excellent subject for a doctoral thesis in sociology, provided that the researcher could incorporate video excerpts into his/her thesis.

As for me, I find that the most brilliant political cartoonists, the funniest stage comedians and the most expert producers of TV satire in the world happen to operate right here in France.

Thank God the web exists

It's commonplace to warn users against things they might find on the Internet, which is not necessarily a synonym for perfect Information with a capital I. Wikipedia is not necessarily the biblical Word, nor Google, the Gospel. It's a fact that, in non-Macintosh circles, spam and viruses have given the Internet a bad reputation. The proliferation of hoaxes and urban myths has no doubt made many gullible folk believe that they should be wary of everything they encounter on the Internet. And sex, too, has often become a dirty word on the web, particularly when it veers towards nasty pornography and pedophilia.

In spite of all these negative connotations, I thank God daily for His creation of the Internet... even though it's only mentioned indirectly in the Bible, where we hear of evil Apple in Bill's luxurious garden of Eden. I'm convinced that, for once, God got his design work right, and gave us something infinitely more positive than the Crusades, the Inquisition, Nazism, Aids, etc. Thanks, God!

Seriously, people often suggest that TV is a far better medium for acquiring factual information than the Internet. Well, I disagree entirely. TV can often be rich in images and interviews, spectacular, captivating and highly persuasive. Even in France, though, TV transmits massive quantities of superficial bullshit. Why do I preface that last assertion with the qualifier "Even in France"? Well, if we were to talk about TV shows in many other countries [which I'll refrain from naming, so as not to offend any of my English-speaking friends], I would say that the bullshit degree often rises exponentially.

Here at Gamone, my satellite dish provides me with so many wonderful programs that I often have to force myself not to watch TV... otherwise I would never find time to get around to worthwhile tasks such as writing my Antipodes blog, or communicating with friends such as my dog Sophia and my billy-goat Gavroche, my donkeys Moshé and Mandrin, or Alison's dog Pif and her horses Bessy and Aigle [now quasi-permanent guests at Gavroche].

Last night, I watched what I thought to be an excellent program in the domain of paleo-anthropology named Search for the Ultimate Survivor, produced by John Rubin for National Geographic.

With the help of 36-year-old Louise Leakey, daughter of Richard Leakey, this documentary discussed the migration of Homo erectus beyond Africa. We encountered an alleged giant nicknamed Goliath, and an Indonesian midget known as Hobbit. All this was excellent TV, but I don't regret verifying things calmly, this morning, by in-depth web consultations. Maybe the ancient giants were simply well-fed creatures no bigger than modern humans, whereas the midgets might have resulted from nutritional circumstances. In both cases, it would appear to be unwise to talk of distinct subspecies of Homo erectus.

We've all seen the advertising punch line: You've seen the film; now you should read the book. An updated version: You've seen the TV documentary; now you should use the Internet to check the facts and put things in their proper perspective.

To conclude on a light note, here's a silly but delightful erectus joke:
In Australia, a visiting Japanese businessman is being interviewed by a young lady specialized in political journalism.

Journalist: In Japan, how often do you have major elections?

Japanese businessman: Me, have big election everly morning.

Jesus festival in Sydney

I've already pointed out in my Antipodes blog article of 2 December 2007 entitled Reenactments [display] that historical reenactments tend to bore me. The most nauseating reenactments of all are those that attempt to recreate intense suffering and torture. Fortunately, I wasn't a spectator of the Catholic reenactment of Golgotha in the streets of Sydney last night, for this tasteless drama would have surely made me break out in an itchy red rash followed by fever and vomiting. Well, almost...

That ridiculous photo really makes me sick... like the images in the old movie Mondo Cane of Italians whipping their backs, during a religious procession, until they're bloody pulp. I'm nauseated primarily by the mindlessness of the creators of such a show in the streets of Sydney, who were no doubt reimbursed royally for their artistic efforts. Their production is senseless shit, with no links whatsoever to plausible history or facts. Their patron saint, no doubt, is Mel Gibson. They're playing for the gullible gallery, to suck them in. I'm saddened to realize that there are hordes of simple folk who need to gulp down such sick visual crap in order to be able to claim that their existence has a sense. They're deluded, of course, but they'll never be educated enough to know it. So, they jubilate innocently and eagerly in this reenactment of their poor lord and would-be savior attached to a structure that reminds me of a massive concrete pylon in the expressway at Circular Quay. Back in the pioneering days, Australia donated eucalyptus trees to Israel, to clean up the coastal swamps. It's utterly ludicrous to imagine for an instant that ancient Palestine, at the epoch of Jesus, might have possessed trees capable of providing timber for such a great cross as in Sydney 2008. But who worries about facts?

The thing that disturbs me most is that compatriots in my native land as a whole, rather than just a handful of silly pilgrims, might be appreciating all this superficial papal bullshit. I'm sure there'll be descriptions, in next Monday's Sydney Morning Herald, of hedonistic papal parties in luxurious residences on the foreshores of Sydney.

Half empty or half full?

I've always considered that the famous case of a glass containing only half its total capacity is a symbol of situations that reoccur constantly in our daily existence. Halfway along the road to a goal, some people think that they're so far away from the desired result that they should abandon their pursuit, whereas others, at a similar point, consider that the end of the tunnel is in sight and that they should strive to reach it. Personally, I tend to give up easily, because I'm plagued continually by the idea that all is vanity, and I say to myself that nothing whatsoever in the Cosmos is finally worth striving for. But I'm not at all certain that I really believe what I say to myself on such occasions. There is, in me, an undeniable and profound Sisyphean streak.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks.

What a splendid expression, this translation by Justin O'Brien of the superb French prose of Albert Camus: "la fidélité supérieure qui nie les dieux et soulève les rochers". So many mysteries—not superficially religious—are subsumed under that vague but marvelous notion of a "higher fidelity". Fidelity, above all, indeed exclusively, with respect to our fundamental and absurd human nature as godless creatures born to be rock raisers.

He, too, concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

It's the Tour de France that puts me in this pensive mood. Half the commentators are crying out that the glass is almost empty. Dope has taken over; it's time to burn down what remains of this cycling extravaganza and get involved in some less obnoxious pursuit. The other half point out with enthusiasm that the news about busting doped cyclists is obviously good news, which means that successful means for catching cheaters are being invented and implemented.

For once, I myself fall unequivocally on the half-full side. Instead of despairing, we are driven to optimism by our higher fidelity to an archaic, magic and mythical phenomenon: the Tour de France.

Dope-inspired miracles

Maybe it was unwise of me, in this morning's article entitled Guinea pig [display], to rave on jokingly about pills and miracles. You never know. French gendarmes might drop in here unexpectedly and carry me off handcuffed and kicking, in front of all my shocked blog readers. Even if I were to scream out in self-defense that my blogging performance is never enhanced by anything more powerful than a few glasses of wine, are people going to believe me? Maybe the Internet authorities should look into the idea of asking bloggers, at the end of particularly grueling and spectacular posts, to upload a urine sample. I'm sure that this must be technologically possible, maybe using webcams in the style of porn artists. As we've been saying for years, unless a draconian approach of this kind is adopted, the whole great blogging system might soon fall into disrepute.

Most people have heard of famous places such as Lourdes where medical miracles are brought about [if I understand correctly, which I don't] through the divine intercession of the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, I'm not sure that many Catholics are aware of the existence of explicit patron saints of medicine and pharmacy.

Their names are Cosmas and Damian. They were third-century twin brothers, of Arabic descent, who generally operated together. Cosmas was the physician, while Damian was primarily an apothecary. The ancient archives fail to make it clear whether the Cosmas/Damian tandem intervened in the specialized domain of sporting medicine. To my mind, this is highly unlikely. Cosmas and Damian are celebrated in that they asked for no fees, and that doesn't sound like typical behavior in the world of sport.

One thing, in any case, is certain. In the Roman and Greek directories of patron saints, nobody stands guard over the domain of dope. This is all the more surprising in that one of the fundamental requirements of sainthood, the power to perform miracles, is an everyday phenomenon in the spheres of dope in sport. Just look at the way that Riccardo Ricco has been flying up the mountain slopes over the last week or so. If that's not a miracle, what is?

Now that the young Italian is out of work, probably for the rest of his sporting existence, his manager might look into the idea, with the help of the pope, of recycling this cyclist into a candidate for canonization, maybe while he's still alive... because the fast-track process is becoming faster and faster. The charming Cobra, already as famous as a rock star (like the pope himself), would become the future patron saint of dope, and he could spend his days, attired in a saintly jersey, pedaling around Rome, Italy and even Europe at large distributing free samples of the latest cocktail of the EPO hormone.

Guinea pig

An American couple from Massachusetts, traveling as tourists in the snowy wastes of Alaska, meet up with an Eskimo man and his wife, living in a primitive hut.

Eskimos: We've heard a lot about Massachusetts, because our eldest son has spent the last few years in the post-graduate anthropological research department at Harvard.

Tourists: Really? How marvelous! What exactly is he studying?

Eskimos: No, he's not studying anything. He's being studied.

Me, too, I'm being studied... by the prestigious French medical research organization called Inserm. A few years ago, after a strenuous incident that consisted of my dragging unaided my runaway ram out of the rushing waters of the River Bourne, I was the victim of a minor cerebral accident that manifested itself (and still does) by a slight numbness in the tip of my right thumb. I referred briefly to this affair in my article of 4 January 2007 entitled Best wishes for eternal health [display]. Well, ever since then, in the interests of medical research, I've been consuming a daily dose of two fat pills. They're wrapped in weekly packets, referred to as blisters, as shown here:

I have a huge supply of these packets in a cardboard box that I keep in my refrigerator, and I start a new packet each Monday. Throughout the week, I cannot possibly forget to take the pills, because they function as a kind of primitive calendar... which takes a bit of getting used to. For example, when I see that the two left columns are empty, that means that either it's Tuesday afternoon, or else it's Wednesday morning and I haven't yet consumed my daily dose. OK, it's not rocket science, but it's better than making notches in a stick. And I can always confirm my intuitive awareness of the current date by calling upon my faithful Macintosh. [Some readers are likely to wonder: Why don't you use your computer for this purpose right from the start? All I can reply to people who ask such questions is that they are obviously insensitive to the joy of the daily consumption of pills.]

Now, the hitch in my job as a guinea pig is that I don't really know what I'm consuming. Theoretically, the big yellowish pills could well contain omega-3, and the smaller reddish ones, a mixture of vitamins. But either of them might be placebos. So, I won't normally know the objective truth until the end of the experiment, scheduled to last for several years.

The most interesting aspect of this affair is that I meet up with a representative of the organization every summer, at a local hospital, for a kind of checkup. Whenever they phone me up, two or three times a year, the researcher (generally a female with an African accent) always seems to be surprised, first, that I'm apparently in excellent health and, second, that I haven't yet got fed up with taking their pills. Yesterday, I couldn't resist the temptation to invent reasons to explain to the lady on the phone why I've never missed out a single day of their pills:

"I'm not supposed to know whether there are active ingredients in my particular pills, or simply placebos. But I've been convinced for ages that you're giving me the real stuff, and that it's doing me good. For me, that knowledge is intuitive and mysterious, and I can't explain what's happening. It's as if I were to see a vision, say, of the Virgin Mary. But it's clear and certain in my mind. Sometimes, around midday, I feel slightly sick and drowsy. Then I realize that I haven't yet taken my daily dose. I only have to gulp down the two precious pills and, within twenty minutes, I'm back in perfect form. It's a true miracle."

During my forthcoming checkup, I imagine they might decide to scrutinize me carefully for advanced signs of dementia.

Meanwhile, in Sydney, Benedict XVI has just visited the memorial chapel of a local nun, named Mary MacKillop [1842-1909], who's on the fast track towards canonization. Click the photo to visit a web article about this humble individual, whose claim to fame is that she created a new order for nuns specializing in free Catholic education for country kids.

Apparently, she already has one cancer-oriented miracle in her posthumous curriculum vitae, but she needs a second one to acquire full-blown sainthood. I'm looking into the idea that maybe I could lend Mother Mary a hand through the above-mentioned pills revelation. It's an undeniable fact that the pills started to exert their miraculous effect upon me when I was out in Sydney in August 2006. I think I should start out by sending a friendly email on this question to the pope.

Tiny jewel

I was happy to find this ladybird in my garden this morning. In the domain of superstitions, these tiny beetles called coccinellids are thought to be good omens. Since ladybirds are predators of garden pests such as aphids, I'm hoping that this little creature will soon find a mate of the opposite sex and produce a big family of baby ladybirds to protect my rose bushes.

Colorful males

Often, civic authorities in the great harbor-side city of Sydney become agitated, flustered and indeed overwhelmed by the prospect of dealing with a handful of foreign visitors. This was the case for the APEC summit [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation] last year, as suggested in my article of 29 August 2007 entitled Sydney skies [display].

Once again, this histrionic behavior has characterized the present papal festival. On such occasions, normal life in the metropolis is shut down temporarily, and the citizens have to bide their time until the visitors leave. I find this weird. Sydney's a big place, and there should be lots of room for everybody. The local population should normally be expected to carry on calmly with their usual activities, instead of being drawn, by their mindless leaders, into a state of temporary trauma.

By comparison, look at Paris. Over the last few days, the city was host to some 43 heads of state, including a certain unwelcome individual, the Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad, who could be considered as a huge potential target for assassination.

The City of Light was invaded by contingents of men and their machines for the great Bastille Day parade. But everything went over smoothly in a perfectly friendly atmosphere. And in the evening, beneath the Eiffel Tower, no less than 600,000 people attended a free concert, followed by a gigantic fireworks display.

By comparison, the events planned for Sydney this week will be trifling. There's only a single major foreigner in town, the pope, and everybody is supposed to love him. So, there's no point in disrupting the life of the nation to protect him... even though we cannot of course be certain that, in the midst of all those lovely young people who believe in magic, there might not be a fuckwit with a gun who would be thrilled to consider boring Benedict, for want of imagination, as a bull's-eye.

Compared with last night's excited concert crowd of 600,000 in the middle of Paris, there'll probably be no more than 500,000 calm Catholic attendees at next Thursday's mass... at Randwick, an empty racecourse located six kilometers from the famous harbor-side skyline of Sydney skyscrapers. So, what's all the fuss about?

I hasten to point out that the word "fuss" is no exaggeration. Believe it or not, back in 2006 (when I was last in Sydney), the NSW government actually voted an act of parliament dedicated to this forthcoming Catholic festival, which stipulated that it would be a crime to "annoy" future Catholic pilgrims. It's only today that we hear a lot about this absolutely insane legislation, at a propitious moment when happy hordes of anti-papal Sydney males are contemplating a naked parade through the streets with their pricks shrouded in fluorescent condoms, to protest against Vatican decisions that accentuate the ongoing Aids holocaust in Africa. Happily, a local court has just ruled retrospectively that the "annoy" clause in the Aussie law is bullshit.

Meanwhile, the Aussie papists have donned their brightest robes, and they're awaiting the emergence of the old white-robed German, who's currently biding his time in solitude, apparently playing the piano, in a rural estate on the outskirts of Sydney.

Another male—whom I admire immensely— is attired in a different color, and I'm delighted to learn that one out of three Australians is following this cycling glory, every evening, on local SBS TV.

Faces of great cyclists, who spend their daily existence in a state of physical agony, are often drawn and contracted, as if they haven't slept well. The facial features of Cadel Evans are stark, accentuated, like those of a Biblical shepherd or fisherman, with a mysterious sad smile. A French newspaper said that Cadel looked like an exhausted zombie. Was he really weeping, yesterday, when the yellow jersey was drawn over his injured shoulder? Were his grimaces expressions of intense inner joy? Tears of a wounded giant? In an instant of glory, we witnessed the frail human carcass of a champion who had been crucified momentarily, accidentally, upon the terrible slopes of the Pyrenées. Like a child, after the official ceremony, Cadel Evans hung on to the rag lion, mascot of the French bank that sponsored his yellow jersey. For a moment, the champion cyclist was all alone, with his warm felt animal and his cold solitary glory. But all the world was watching this fabulous hero. All Australia.

Over the next few days, the color of Australia will be neither red nor white, but yellow! Aussie action will be situated, not at Randwick Racecourse, but upon a mythical field of heroes in the south of France. Cycling enthusiasts in Australia will understand what I'm trying to say. Monsieur Evans, the entire nation is behind you, including those who are praying at Randwick. Go for it, Cadel!

Blue, blues

My second-favorite computing company has made a graphic effort to remind us that today is the 14th of July, Bastille Day.

Symbolically, this year's celebrations are dominated by the color blue. For the first time, soldiers of the UN Blue Beret peacekeeping force will be marching in this morning's military parade in the City of Light.

As the defense minister Bernard Kouchner just remarked, today's 14th of July will be considered exceptionally, in the future, as "the day after the 13th of July 2008". What he's saying, jokingly, is that statesmen were preoccupied yesterday by the summit meeting to promulgate the concept of the Union for the Mediterranean.

Finally, there's the blue of the flag of the European Union, of which France has just been assigned the presidency.

Alongside all this bright blue, however, there's a wave of military blues in France today. To call a spade a spade, between Nicolas Sarkozy and the French armies, the current relationship is as cold as an unfired cannon. Something seems to have gone tremendously wrong between the supreme commander and his troops. For many reasons (which are too detailed to be examined here, even if I were capable of doing so... which I'm not), the French armies seem to have lost confidence in their chief, and he in turn no longer knows how to charm his soldiers. This distrust came to a head in the context of the shooting drama of 29 June 2008 at Carcassonne, when a soldier accidentally fired real bullets into a crowd at a military festival, wounding seventeen innocent spectators. Many military representatives consider that Nicolas Sarkozy failed to handle the aftermath of that tragic affair in a just manner. A journalist claimed that feelings between the president and military personnel have sunken to the lowest level since the notorious putsch of French generals in Algeria against Charles de Gaulle on 21 April 1961. To put it mildly, on this Bastille Day, that's a sobering observation.

Tour heats up

Tour de France specialists had imagined that today's stage from Toulouse to Bagnères-de-Bigorre would be relatively uneventful, because riders would be saving their energy for the Bastille Day ascension, tomorrow, of the terrible Tourmalet. But there was a lot of significant action today, both negative and positive. On the sad side, it was hard to understand how a talented rider such as Australia's Cadel Evans, favorite for the final victory in this year's Tour, could crash on an ordinary wide bend in the road.

Maybe he slid on loose gravel. Evans (shown here receiving treatment from the race doctor Gérard Porte) had superficial wounds all over the left side of his body, but no broken bones.

The greatest surprise of the day was the spectacular performance of a lightweight Italian youngster with a nice-sounding name, Riccardo Ricco, who won a stage for the second time in the present Tour.

In an aerial style that reminded onlookers of the late Marco Pantini, Ricco seemed to fly over any riders he encountered on his dash up and over the final mountain in today's stage. Pantini, who was once a hero for Riccardo, was nicknamed Elefantino (little elephant) because of his large ears and frail body. Ricco has a more biting nickname, Cobra. Will he strike for the third time, tomorrow, on the heights of the legendary Tourmalet?

Union for the Mediterranean

It would be extraordinary, in many ways, if today's summit meeting organized by Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris were to be a prelude to success concerning the creation of a Union for the Mediterranean. Throughout history, this great sea in the middle of the planet Terra has been a place of violence.

As recently as 1962, when I first set foot in France, bombs were exploding in Paris as a final consequence of a terrible conflict between France and Algeria. Anecdote: I'll never forget hearing and seeing the outcome of an explosion, one February evening, opposite my hotel in the Rue des Ecoles, which destroyed a bookshop window into which I had been gazing a few minutes earlier.

For the moment, it's too early to guess whether Sarkozy's daring initiative might bear fruit.

On French TV this evening, Bashar Al-Assad was interviewed by the journalist Laurent Delahousse, and my overall impression was more positive than what I might have expected. The Syrian leader certainly sounds like a less bellicose man than his late father. Before the Mediterranean becomes a sea of peace, however, a lot of water will flow through the Strait of Gibraltar.

Pif, a constant visitor

As I predicted, right from the start, my neighbor Alison's friendly little black Labrador named Pif has become a constant visitor at my place. I should speak rather of Sophia's place, because Pif comes here daily like a pupil turning up for master lessons from his female guru, Sophia, in the advanced arts of dog behavior. The other day, I awarded him a red collar, which used to belong to Sophia.

Pif spends his time trying to impress Sophia with his attack techniques, but he's a bit on the light side. He tries to get at her from behind, or to jump up onto her and pin her down, but it's like a jockey trying to tackle a sumo wrestler. Most of the time, Sophia stands firmly on her four paws, whereas Pif is dancing non-stop all around his opponent.

Sophia's wide-opened mouth can almost enclose Pif's entire head. Whenever Sophia has had enough of Pif jumping all around her, and pinching her neck with his sharp little teeth, she snarls in an eloquent manner, and the little fellow understands immediately that enough is enough. In spite of all the bared teeth and growling, neither dog ever appears to inflict pain upon the other.

Towards the end of the day, Pif found an old magazine in my kitchen, took it outside, where light rain was falling, and tore it to shreds.

Alison is unhappy to discover that, as soon as she leaves home on her scooter (to work as a waitress at the caves of Choranche), her dog moves down here to my place. And Sophia and I are also becoming a little fed up with these regular visits. Although I generally find Pif adorable, it's definitely not a good thing for a dog to spend so much time away from home.

Boring Benedict

Once upon time, the human phenomenon known as religion used to deal with gigantic fundamental interrogations such as the meaning of our existence, the creation and destiny of the Cosmos, the concepts of good and evil, the mysteries of life, love and death, and the power of prayer. Religion was at least a noble human preoccupation, even though it has ended up getting pushed out of the way, first by philosophy, and now by science. As in the case of all entities facing extinction, future fossils are starting to form... and Benedict XVI is a pure still-living specimen. Excluding dyed-in-the-wool Catholics, few intelligent observers give a damn about what the pope thinks about anything whatsoever in the modern world, for the simple reason that this old man in white robes has never really lived in the modern world, and his knowledge of reality is surely akin to that of a backward adolescent, reared in a cocoon from which he has never emerged. So, what can we expect him to talk about during his visit to Australia? Well, of all things, he's expected to ramble on about the sexual mischief committed by priests, as if airing the Church's dirty washing were henceforth a major task for this archaic practitioner of magic. Yawn... When will this boring stupidity end?

Walnut wine

This afternoon, I started to prepare this year's walnut wine.

According to the traditional recipe for walnut wine, one should start to gather green walnuts after the feast-day of Saint John, which falls on June 24. Up here on the slopes of the Vercors, the fruit mature more slowly than down in the Isère valley. Today was the limit, though, because the wood of the future nut shell is starting to form.

I've figured out that, inside my plastic cask, there should be room for the walnuts in the wire basket and about three dozen liters of red wine. In fact, I use a volumetric ratio of 7:2:1 for wine, walnuts and (later) alcohol. More precisely, my intention is to macerate ten liters of walnuts in 35 liters of wine.

To measure out the chopped-up walnuts, I used an aluminium jug (in fact, a Greek implement for serving a liter of retsina wine). I had a rubber glove on my left hand, to hold the walnut while I was cutting it into four or five fragments, but my right hand, holding the knife, remained bare. Consequently, it soon looked like this:

These ugly brown stains won't disappear for a week or so. Throughout the region, one can easily recognize fellow walnut-wine makers.

[Anecdote: The first thing I did this morning, before even thinking about making walnut wine, was to lodge an application at the mayoral office in Choranche for my first French identity card. As required by law, the secretary took my fingerprint. She would have been surprised, I imagine, to encounter the fingers of a walnut-wine producer. Maybe such fingers are so cruddy that they can't even be printed!]

Tomorrow morning, I'll drive to St-Marcellin with the cask containing the chopped-up walnuts, and I'll purchase the required coarse 12-degree wine from a specialized bulk-wine dealer. Then it's simply a matter of allowing the maceration process to take place in my cellar at Gamone for at least three months.

Thai prawns

In the cooking domain, I often become attached to a particular dish for a certain period of time, which means preparing it at a rate of once every fortnight or so, say, with slight variations. For the last couple of months, I've been going through a Thai prawns period. Here's a photo of the basic ingredients:

Besides the prawns, shallots and garlic, the green stuff in the bowl comes from my garden: a mixture of finely-chopped parsley, chives, mint and coriander leaves. The French product called Maïzena is corn flour, the large jar contains powdered ginger, while the small jar contains red chili paste. One bottle contains Thai fish sauce; the other, Japanese sesame oil. Place the shallots, garlic and aromatic plants in a food mixer along with a tablespoon of cornflour, two teaspoons of fish sauce, a teaspoon of ginger and a small quantity of chili paste. When the mixture is homogeneous, add the prawns and mix for a few seconds. Place the result on a board covered in bread crumbs, flatten it into a rectangle and sprinkle the upper surface with sesame oil followed by more bread crumbs.

Leave the board and its contents in the refrigerator overnight, so that the paste coalesces into a solid slab. The next day, I sliced the past into small rectangles and cooked them slowly on the plancha plate of my Cuisinart grill.

I served up the prawn rissoles with pieces of baked red peppers and deep-fried rice noodles.

Ségolène in attack mode

The recent behavior of former presidential candidate Ségolène Royal has been unexpected, indeed disturbing. First, when everybody was jubilating about the release of Ingrid Betancourt, Ségolène threw a spanner in the works by declaring publicly that Nicolas Sarkozy had played no role whatsoever in that operation. In fact, Ségolène's opinion was justified. Like many observers, I was shocked when I saw Sarkozy making a TV appearance with Ingrid's children in tow, just an hour or so after the message of her release was flashed on our screens. But Ségolène's outspoken opinion on this affair struck many people as "politically incorrect", since Sarkozy had been attempting constantly to obtain the release of Ingrid Betancourt, but with no success.

More recently, Ségolène shocked many people when she suggested that a couple of criminal intrusions into her Paris flat might be linked in a causal manner to her public criticism of Sarkozy's style of reigning over France. In speaking in this way, she did in fact come very close to blaming the Sarkozy clan for a misdemeanor, but without supplying any explicit proofs for such an accusation.

Some of Sarkozy's political associates have suggested that Ségolène has "blown a fuse", and lost control of herself... but I'm not convinced that her detractors really believe what they're saying. It's quite obvious that Ségolène, faced with the phenomenon of Sarkozy, has decided deliberately to step up her carefully-planned provocations and move into attack mode, so that French citizens see her clearly, from now on, as an aggressive opponent of the president. There are no limits, as it were, to the ways and means by which she seeks to vent her anger against Sarkozy. In any case, as far as I'm concerned, Ségolène's anti-Sarkozian outbursts are perfectly logical and politically sound. There would be no point in her trying to be nice and polite with a protagonist such as Sarkozy. In any case, she's unlikely to get hurt, from a popularity viewpoint, by adopting a strategy that consists of being systematically nasty with respect to the president.

Going digital

Ever since arriving on the planet Earth and acquiring fuzzy means [which I didn't even have to pay for] of comprehending vaguely what seemed to be happening around me, I can truly say that my most extraordinary observation in the Cosmos is that most folk appear to find this whole human-existence affair quite "ordinary". Some of my best friends, for example, have spent most of their latest years playing golf, intensely and profoundly, as if this were their ordinary God-ordained destiny. They would no doubt think of me as crazy or sick to even raise a doubt about the perfectly ordinary worthiness of their golfing preoccupations, as opposed to any kind of philosophical quest for enlightenment. Other close friends don't waste their time on Earth belting balls over globally-warmed fields, but they find me just as crazy or sick when I refer to science, quantum physics, the so-called "theory of everything", multiverses and the beautiful literary opus of Richard Dawkins. The friends in question are prompt in concluding that I'm a psychotic fraudster who hates his fellow men, sees himself egotistically but falsely as an elitist intellectual, despises his own children, and is doomed to die in sad solitude... which, incidentally, to me, sounds like a perfectly normal way to die. Sincerely, I conclude that it wasn't worthwhile getting married and having children, if one's closest friends end up thinking of me in such a way. But I really don't care, because I'm totally convinced, like a absolutist monk, that my philosophical judgment and my faith in science are correct. And I'm saddened by the narrow-mindedness of the critical friends in question.

Looking back on my existence, I find it extraordinary that my personal path has passed alongside many phenomena of a strictly digital nature:

— I started work with IBM Australia as a computer programmer in 1957, at the age of 17. It goes without saying that this was my grand initiation into the digital world... which was a largely unknown entity at that time.

— Much later, in Paris, I happened to become aware of the digital nature of music, and I wrote a vague article on computer music.

— For much of my adult life, I've been spending money to purchase delightful electronic gadgets of a so-called analog kind, only to discover, shortly after, that they're being replaced by digital equipment. In that losers category, I reckon I might be a champion... but I prefer to see myself as a mere innocent victim of change. My monument, at this level, is my Revox tape recorder and my Midi-based music studio... not to mention a lovely old super-8 movie camera recuperated—for old times sake, you might say—by my most-digital son François.

Today, of course, everything has become digital: not only machines, but life itself... ever since the momentous discovery of the double helix of DNA by Watson and Crick. In the same way that a celebrated French TV presenter sees himself and his generation as "children of TV", I envisage myself as a "digital child". My genome is a soulless series of numbers, and I'm happy to see myself as such.

I've just devised a French-language project that consists of writing my autobiography in this spirit. The digital title: One, two, three... many. Subtitle: A solitary voyager from the Antipodes discovers incredible worlds. Nice, no?